Winemaker Notes
#37 Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2025
This wine offers a savory, floral, and spice-driven nose with notes of rose, spice, and sandalwood, while the palate reveals fresh red fruits such as raspberry and tart cherry, balanced by bright acidity, baking spice, and a smooth, juicy texture.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2023 Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard, from the eastern hillside of this expansive site, pours a vibrant ruby hue and offers a stunning bouquet of wild raspberries, blue flowers, violets, rocky earth, and tea leaves. Medium-bodied, with a mineral texture and an expansive feel, it’s one of the best Shea Vineyards.
Rating: 96+ -
Wine Spectator
Precise and detailed, with a slightly brooding core that propels its dark cherry and raspberry flavors, which are accented by blood orange and spiced tea tones as this gathers tension and tannins on the finish.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
Yamhill-Carlton, characterized by pastoral, rolling hills composed of shallow, quick-draining, ancient marine soil, is ideal for Pinot noir and other cool-climate-loving varieties. It is in the rain shadow of the Coast Range to its west, whose highest point climbs to an altitude of 3,500 feet. Yamhill-Carlton is actually surrounded by mountains on three sides: Chehalem Mountains to the north, the Dundee Hills to the east and the western Coast Range to its west, which, when it lets Pacific air through, serves to cool the region.
Vineyards grow on the ridges surrounding the two small communities of Yamhill and Carlton and cover about 1,200 acres of this 60,000 acre region, which roughly makes a horse-shoe shape on a map.